Crystal Media

Marketing Clarity.

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Evaluating Value vs. Complexity to Create Winning Strategies for Success: The Modern Marketing Show, Episode 77

It’s the new year and it’s time to start planning your marketing for 2019. I wanted to share with you an exercise we do at my company. I like to call it evaluating value vs. complexity. This is a great starting place to determine your SMART goals and using them to reverse engineer your marketing plan.

Watch the full episode:

It’s important to understand what campaigns you’ve run in the past that brought high value and were hopefully easy to achieve. Then you want to ask yourself how you can improve on those campaigns and make them even better. Campaigns or events that didn’t produce and were hard to achieve should be reconsidered or taken off your list altogether. We only want winning strategies for success in 2019.

Now it’s time to take action. Set aside a couple hours this week to complete this value vs. complexity exercise so you can set your SMART goals and have an awesome year ahead.

Are you interested in spending 3-days with my team and I at our office in Carlsbad, Ca for some hands-on social media and marketing training? Well, you’re in luck because we’re hosting our first workshop of the year on February 20-22. Secure your seat today!

You can catch new episodes of The Modern Marketing Show every Monday at 10 a.m PST on our Facebook Page. Replays will be available on the blog each week.

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Not Getting Results? It May Be Your Branding

Branding. It’s a major buzzword that can have a pretty broad meaning. Essentially, your brand is a culmination of the words, sentences, images, logos, and names you use to describe your business. The key to a good brand is consistency, and building a good brand is exactly what we’re talking about in the latest episode of Crystal Media TV! Read about our own branding changes below this video.

We recently made some upgrades to our own branding by choosing a consistent username for all of our social media platforms. It can be difficult to have a consistent username because what may be an available username on one social media platform may not be available on another. We ran into this issue with Crystal Media, and were left with @madametwit on Twitter, @crystalmediamarketing on Facebook, @c_vilkaitis on Pinterest, and @crystalmedia on Instagram. This made it more difficult for other users to find us, as they asked themselves:

“What was their username again?”

Because @crystalmedia was only available on Instagram, we chose a username that we would be able to use on ALL of our networks. How do you know what’s available? You can do this manually by trying out your username on each site, but it’s MUCH easier to use Namechk. Namechk checks all of the major (and many of the minor) social media sites, as well as registered domains, to show you what is currently open for grabs.

In the end, we chose @heycrystalmedia as our username, and it’s easier than ever to find us online!

There are always small tweaks that you can make to build a stronger brand and make a stronger connection with your customers!

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Getting Over #Hashtag Intimidation

Working hard in the Crystal Media “laboratories” (aka, at our desks), we’ve discovered a new and dangerous condition. It’s called “#Hashtag Intimidation,” and it affects thousands of retailers each year. Symptoms include sweaty palms before sending a tweet and avoidance of hashtag usage on Instagram. Luckily, there is a cure.

This article!

Are you filled with fear and frustration every time your finger gets close to the pound symbol on your keyboard? You may be suffering from Hashtag Intimidation! For anyone who may not have grown up with social media, hashtags can be one of the most confusing parts about using these sites to market your business. And you’re not alone. Dozens of retailers approach us each year to let us know that they just don’t get hashtags, and they are too nervous to use more than one.

We thought we would take this opportunity to answer a bunch of hashtag questions at once!

What is a hashtag?

A hashtag is a keyword or phrase that follows a # symbol on social media. By hashtagging a word, you make it easier for other users to find your message when they search for it. Hashtags have no spaces, even if you are using a phrase.

As a consumer, you may want to look up “good coffee shops in San Diego.” Your search would yield results like:

“Coffee, Coffee, Coffee is the BEST #coffeeshop in #SanDiego!”

As a business owner, say a toy store in Portland, you might tweet, “We’ve got the best supply of #toys in #Portland! #melissaanddoug.”

By adding these hashtags, you increase the chance of people searching for toys, Portland, or Melissa and Doug, finding you and your store!

What problem do hashtags help to solve?

When anyone searches ANYTHING, their problem is a lack of information. They need to know something and they need to know it now. Hashtags make finding that information easier, which benefits users AND the companies trying to be found.

Can you use too many hashtags?

Yes, you can use too many hashtags, but only if you’re adding hashtags that aren’t applicable to your message. On Instagram, it’s common for users to use upwards of 10 hashtags to attract people to their post.

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However, if you use too many hashtags, you may turn users away and lead them to believe that you are a spam account.

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Remember that on Twitter, the most common place to use hashtags, you are limited to 140 characters. Make them count, including hashtags!

What is the benefit of using multiple hashtags?

Multiple hashtags allow you to reach more people. By including a location hashtag and a brand hashtag, you’ll increase the chances that users searching for that brand OR location will find you, as well as increase the chances that people searching for that brand AND location (your target audience) will find you.

How can I use hashtags in conjunction with events?

When you use a hashtag, your post is pulled into search results with other posts including that hashtag. For instance, if you’re driving your new Ford and tweet using the hashtag #Ford, your tweet will show up in results with other users talking about Ford.

This means that if you are having an event, you can create a unique hashtag for it (typically a shortened version of the event name) and encourage customers to use it to promote the event and give you access to all of the posts about it!

How do you use hashtags differently on different sites?

As we mentioned, Twitter is where hashtags are used most often. Next would be Instagram, where many users will use hashtags in the caption of their photos. Many other social sites utilize hashtags, like Vine and Pinterest. Hashtags can be used on Facebook as well, but it is less common. Typically, users who use hashtags on Facebook do it for extra effect, such as:

“Wrapping up our summer clearance this week! #WeLoveFall.”

Still have questions about hashtags? Leave them in the comments and we MAY just do a follow-up post using them!